Abstract
The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1996, p. 57) wrote, “The most erroneous stories are the ones we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.” This essay addresses two intertwining narratives that demand close scrutiny - Mother Nature and the Balance of Nature. Both are common in environmental discourse and generally accepted without question. For example, consider how often western popular culture refers to the workings of “Mother Nature” in affecting the “balance of nature.” Wood (1999) suggested in an article entitled “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” that with respect to genetically modified foods, “Consumer concerns about tampering with the balance of nature are legitimate….” Similarly, an organic gardening newsletter instructs “By mimicking Mother Nature and taking cues from her natural cycle, organic gardeners… enhance the balance of nature” (Anonymous, VillageOrganics.com). This essay has three objectives: first, to examine Mother Nature and the evolution of the metaphor from deity through the dualistic human-nature paradigm; second, to trace the development of Balance of Nature as a cultural and scientific concept, and third, to weave together the notions of Mother Nature and Balance of Nature insofar as they hold implications for environmental conservation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Allen, T. F. H., Tainter, J. A., Pires, C., and Hoekstra, T. W. (2001). Dragnet ecology, ‘Just the facts Ma’am’: The privilege of science in a post-modern world. Bioscience 51: 475-485.
Allee, W. C., Emerson, A. E., Park, O., Park, T., and Schmidt, K. P. (1949). Principles of Animal Ecology, Saunders, Philadelphia.
Andrewartha, H. G., and Birch, L. C. (1954). The Distribution and Abundance of Animals, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois.
Anonymous. (nd). What is Organic in Village News, http://www.villageorganics.com/whatnewinor.html.
Baker, W. L. (1989). Landscape ecology and nature reserve design in the Boundary Waters Canoe area, Minnesota. Ecology 70: 23-35.
Baker, W. L. (1992). Effects of settlement and fire suppression on landscape structure. Ecology 73: 1879-1887.
Black, Max (1962). Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Botkin, D. (1990). Discordant Harmonies, Oxford University Press, New York.
Boyd, R. (1993). Metaphor and theory change: what is ‘metaphor’ a metaphor For? In Ortony, A. (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 381-532.
Byrne, J. M. (1997). Religion and the Enlightenment: From Descartes to Kant, Westminster John Know, Louisville, KY.
Clements, F. E. (1916). Plant Succession: An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation, Publication 242, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC.
Clements, F. W. (1936). Nature and structure of the climax. Journal of Ecology 24: 252-284.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, John Murray, London.
Darwin, C. (1887). In Barlow, N. (ed.), The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, W. W. Norton, New York.
Davis, E. (1971). The First Sex, Putnam, London.
Descartes, R. (1637). Discourse on Method, trans. E. S. Haldane, G. T. Ross (1968), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Egerton, F. N. (1973). Changing concepts in the balance of nature. The Quarterly Review of Biology 48: 322-350.
Elliot, W. (2002). It’s Not Nice to Fool with Mother Nature, Buffalo News, March 14.
Elton, C. (1930). Animal Ecology and Evolution, Methuen, New York.
Emel, J. (1995). Are you man enough, big and bad enough? Ecofeminism and wolf eradication in the USA. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 707-734.
Engelsman, J. C. (1979). The Feminine Dimension of the Divine, Westminster, Philadelphia, PA.
Ettema, J., and Glasser, T. L. (1989). Narrative form and moral force: The realization of innocence and guilt through investigative journalism. In Brock, B. L., Scott, R. L., and Chesebro, J. W. (eds.), Methods of Rhetorical Criticism: A Twentieth-Century Perspective, 3rd ed., Wayne State University Press, Detroit, pp. 256-272.
Geary, L. H. (2002). Disaster-Proof Your Disaster Insurance: How to Protect Your Home When Mother Nature Kicks in the Door. CNNMoney, June 20, http://money.cnn.com/2002/06/18/pf/yourhome/qdisasterinsure/.
Ghiselin, M. T. (1981). Applied ecology. In Kormondy, E. J., and McCormick, J. F. (eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Developments in World Ecology, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connral Theology, pp. 651-664.
Glacken, C. J. (1967). Traces on the Rhodian Shore, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Gleason, H. A. (1926). The individualistic concept of the plant association. Bulletin of the Torrey Botantical Club 47: 21-33.
Gleason, H. A. (1939). The individualistic concept of the plant association. American Midland Naturalist 21: 92-110.
Gould, S. J. (1996). Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, Random House, New York.
Hellsten, I. (2000). Dolly. Scientific breakthrough or Frankenstein’s monster? Scientific and journalistic metaphors of cloning. Metaphor and Symbol 15: 213-221.
Hellsten, I. (2002). Selling life sciences. Promises of a better future in biotechnology advertisements. Science as Culture 11: 459-479.
Herodotus. (1858). Histories: Translated with Notes by George Rawlinson; With an Introduction by Tom Griffith, Ware, Wordsworth Classics of World Literature.
Herring, D. (2000). Second guessing mother nature: Forecasting the surprise snow of January 2000. NASA Earth Observatory, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Blizzard/.
Hull, R. B., Robertson, D. P., Richert, D., Seekamp, E., and Buhyoff, G. J. (2002). Assumptions about ecological scale and nature knowing best hiding in environmental decisions. Conservation Ecology 6: 12.
Keller, E. F. (1985). Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Kerr, R. A. (2008). Mother Nature cools the greenhouse but hotter times lay ahead. ScienceNow 320:595, May 2, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5876/595.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London.
Langston, N. E. (1998). People and nature. In Dodson, S. I. and seven others. (eds.), Ecology, Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford, pp. 25-76.
Latour, B., and Strum, S. C. (1986). Human social origins: Oh please, tell us another story. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 9: 169-187.
Leeming, D. A. (1990). The World of Myth: An Anthology, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Leopold, A. (1949). A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River, Ballantine Books, New York.
Livingston, E. A. (ed.). (2000). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church New Edition, Oxford, New York.
Lowenthall, D. (2000). Nature and morality from George Perkins Marsh to the millennium. Journal of Historical Geography 26: 3-27.
Lovelock, J. E. (1988). The Ages of Gaia, W. W. Norton, New York.
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus). (1968). De Rerum Natura, trans. R. Humphries, Book V Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Marsh, G. P. (1864). Man and Nature, Annotated Reprint of the Original 1964, Harvard Press, Cambridge.
Mason, B. (2005) Outdoing Mother Nature. ScienceNow March 4, http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/2005/304/1.
McIntosh, R. P. (1985). The Background of Ecology, Concept and Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Merchant, C. (1980). The Death of Nature, Wildwood House, London.
O’Brien, W. E. (2002). The nature of shifting cultivation: Stories of harmony, degradation, and redemption. Human Ecology 30: 483-502.
Odum, E. P. (1959). Fundamentals of Ecology, 2nd ed., Saunders, Philadelphia.
Odum, E. P. (1992). Great ideas in ecology for the 1990s. Bioscience 42: 78-85.
Odum, H. T. (1983). Systems Ecology: An Introduction, Wiley, New York.
O’Rourke, E. (2000). The reintroduction and reinterpretation of the wild. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 13: 145-165.
O’Neill, R. V. (2001). Is it time to bury the ecosystem concept? Ecology 82: 3275-3284.
Paley, W. (1802). Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, 1st ed., Tegg, London.
Pickett, S. T. A., Kolasa, J., and Jones, C. G. (1994). Ecological Understanding, Academic Press, New York.
Pimm, S. (1991). The Balance of Nature: Ecological Issues in the Conservation of Species and Communities, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Rhode, K. (2005). Nonequilibrium Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Romme, W. H., and Despain, D. G. (1989). Historical perspective on the Yellowstone Fires of 1988. Bioscience 39: 696-699.
Rose, H. J. (1957). Gods and Heroes of the Greeks, Methuen, London.
Serpell, J. (1996). In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Schafer, P. (2002). Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbala, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Shelford, V. E. (1913). Animal Communities in Temperate America as Illustrated in the Chicago Region. No. 5 Bulletin of the Geographical Society of Chicago (1977), Arno Press, New York.
Siggurdson, C. (1998). Indiana wheat escapes damage from late-winter storm. Purdue Ag News Roundup, April 10, http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html3month/980410.Ag. roundup.html.
Smith, H. (1989). Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, Quest, Wheaton, IL.
Tansley, A. G. (1935). The use and abuse of vegetational terms. Ecology 14: 284-307.
Ucko, P. (1962). The interpretation of prehistoric anthropomorphic figurines. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 92: 38-54.
United States Department of Agriculture. (1997). Mother nature stirs up the wheat market. Economic Research Service, Agricultural Outlook, Commodity Brief, June.
White, P.S (1979). Pattern, process, and natural disturbance in vegetation. Botanical Review 45: 229-299.
Wiens, J. A. (1984) On understanding a non-equilibrium world: myth and reality in community patterns and processes. In Strong D. R., Jr., Simberloff D., Abele L. G., and Thistle A. B. (eds.), Ecological Communities: Conceptual Issues and the Evidence. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, pp. 439-457.
Williams, R. (1976). Keywords, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Wilson, E. O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Knoph, New York.
Wood, V. B. (1999). It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, Austin Chronicle, Volume 18, Issue 49, http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/voll8/issue49/food.genetic.html.
Worster, D. (1994). Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Wu, J., and Loucks, O. L. (1995). From balance of nature to hierarchical patch dynamics: A paradigm shift in ecology. Quarterly Review of Biology 70: 439-466.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jelinski, D.E. (2010). On the Notions of Mother Nature and the Balance of Nature and Their Implications for Conservation. In: Bates, D., Tucker, J. (eds) Human Ecology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5701-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5701-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-5700-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-5701-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)